


Capybaras and "Otter" Animals

by BoxOnTheNile



Series: Gifted Lives [6]
Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern with Magic, Child Soldiers, F/F, Felix's particular brand of shittiness, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Minor crossover with Wolf 359, Slow Burn, bc the new republic needed a counterpart to grey and then she took on a life of her own, for leechy's au again, it's extremely non-graphic though, magic gifts, this is 100 percent leechy's fault btw
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-26
Updated: 2018-12-27
Packaged: 2019-06-16 12:10:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,959
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15436752
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BoxOnTheNile/pseuds/BoxOnTheNile
Summary: When the New Republic merges with the Feds, it does not go smoothly. The medical teams are better at it than the rest, so long as you ignore the barbs traded between their CMOs.Jacobi just wishes Grey wasn't so fucking perfect all the time. Her heart can't take it.





	1. Fifteen Hundred File Folders

**Author's Note:**

> Leechy asked me about Jacobi for her Doyle fic in this 'verse and off-handedly mentioned that she and Grey should kiss and I made.... this......
> 
> This is? Pretty OC centric? which is something I've never done on my Ao3 but I guess it is now.

The first time the power surges and cut in one of the New Republic bases and corrupts her medical records, Alanna Jacobi backs up each file and spends every free second she had for the next two and a half months handwriting and filing the medical records of almost eight hundred cadets and four hundred officers, plus about three hundred miscellaneous staff. 

Matthews brings the first rock during this time. Her hands are aching and she can’t quite read the word the came next on her computer screen when he knocks on the doorframe to her office.

“I found something cool,” he says very seriously. She ushers him in, and he drops a rock directly onto the desk. She stares for a moment, tilting her head in confusion… and saw it. The layers of the rock warp into a “J” at this angle. 

She laughs a little, picking it up. It’s smooth and fits perfectly into her hand. “Private Matthews, are you sure you want me to have it? Isn’t Private Jensen your friend?”

“She wants you to have it, too.” Matthews beams at her, and she’s tired and her wrists hurt and he’s _so fucking young_ -

She bursts into tears. Huge wracking sobs, right at her desk, rock pressed against her chest. Matthews panics and bolts, coming back a few minutes later with Felix at his heels. The mercenary is new to the headquarters, showing up to debrief with the new General, and Jacobi doesn’t know how to feel about him yet. It doesn’t stop him from carefully putting a hand between her shoulder blades and _shoosh_ -ing her softly.

He looks at the the papers scattered around her. “Oh, Doctor Jacobi. This army doesn’t deserve you.”

“This army deserves better than any one woman can do,” she says wetly, rubbing at her face to catch her tears before they fall and ruin her work. “But they just have me, and I have to be enough.”

“Get some rest,” Felix tells her. “You need it, and I will go to General Kimball if I have to.”

She does. She doesn’t realize Matthews’s rock is still in her hand until she makes it back to her quarters. She tucks it under her pillow and resolves to give it back tomorrow. She has six hours before she has to be back on rounds, and she sleeps for almost all of it.

She swings by her office to drop off the rock- can’t take onto the floor- and finds Matthews, Jensen, and Bitters asleep on the floor. There’s three neat stacks of manilla folders, each labelled in the cadets’ handwriting. She almost cries again, but there’s no time, so she sets the rock on Matthews’s pile and closes the door behind her.

* * *

The bombs drop right above HQ. The cave shudders, but holds.

The window of Jacobi’s office shatters, and papers fly everywhere. It takes her two hours to clear out the glass and get them back in order, two hours that should have been spent _copying more files_. The only pile that survived was the one Matthews left the damn ~~precious~~ rock on.

Jacobi goes outside, fills her pockets with rocks, and weighs down the rest of her papers.

Matthews lights up when he sees them. “Are you collecting rocks now?”

She hands him a pen, a stack of paper, and a tablet. “Less talking, more writing. And no, I’m not.” She likes Matthews. She feels better when he’s around, somehow. 

“Are you sure?” He drags out the “r” as he rifles around in his pocket. “Because I found this!”

The stone is oblong and flawless. It’d be useless for holding anything down, but she sighs dramatically and reaches for it. It’s warm, warmer than it should be.

She drops it in her desk drawer.

“Maybe you can give me rocks,” she says. Matthews giggles a little as he starts writing.

* * *

"Felix wasn't kidding."

Jacobi looks up, bleary eyed, to the most beautiful woman she's ever seen. Goddamnit, she's too tired for this level of gay. "About what?"

"This." The woman gestures around, to the piles of folders on every flat surface of her office, each weighed down with a rock brought to her by a cadet. "Felix said the system only went down once?"

"It took me three weeks to recover the data," Jacobi says. "I lost good soldiers, good people, because I didn't have their records when I needed them. I won't let that happen again."

The woman nods. "I'll get you moved to a bigger office and assign a few of the younger cadets to help."

"What? How?"

She smiles. "Oh, right, let me introduce myself." She holds out a hand for Jacobi to shake. "I'm General Vanessa Kimball."

Jacobi falls in love a little.

* * *

“How long have you had a headache?” she asks Matthews suddenly. It’s been three months since the power surge, and the last of the files is almost done. After this, she just has to catch Felix between blowing up Fed outposts and fucking his way through half the officers to get _his_ medical history and she officially has a physical copy of the records of everyone in the New Republic.

“Hm?” Matthews take a second to shake out his wrist. He’s been helping her write for most the day. The rest of the cadets ducked out hours ago.

“Headache, honey.”

“Just now. How could you tell?”

She starts to answer before she realizes she… can’t. She has no idea how she knew, she wasn’t even _looking_ at Matthews. She could just sort of. Tell.

It clicks.

When she was little, her papa had taken apart an old radio and put it back together, and somehow, it worked better. The sound was clearer, and it picked up signal even in the basement. He had a way with radios, he’d said. Called it his Whale’s Call.

Called it his Gift.

Alanna knew she wouldn’t have one- they were relatively uncommon, and she was adopted. The odds her birth family had a Gift in their bloodline were small. She’d been crushed when she was a child, but she proved to herself that she didn’t need one.

“I have a Gift,” she whispers, softly, and Matthews gasps.

“Me too!” he says, dropping his pen. “What’s yours?”

“I don’t know!” She giggles hysterically. “I just realized! I don’t even know how long I’ve had it.”

Matthews looks around at the rocks all over her office. “Think you’re an otter? They collect rocks, too.”

“Maybe?” This is _insane_ , can people even get Gifts as adults? Even if they could, she wasn’t anything special. A mediocre surgeon who wasn’t even able to perform surgery right now, her wrists fucked from all the files.

From the fifteen hundred medical files she just hand wrote on the off chance it would save someone if the power went out again.

Jacobi looks at the rock on her desk, tilts her head ever so slightly to see the “J”. She’s been carrying it in her pocket for almost a week now.

She’s always liked otters.

* * *

Jacobi looks up when Felix clears his throat. “I told you I'd have my inventory list for your supply run tomorrow.” She's still figuring out how to even _make_ those inventory lists. General Kimball appointed her as Chief Medical Officer two weeks ago.

“Not here for that. Not here for that either.” He waves a hand when she reaches for a desk drawer. She started keeping condoms in her office the second time someone came to her with a pregnancy scare.

“Then what do you need?” She's puzzled; Felix has been avoiding her since she cornered him for his medical history.

“Heard some cadets say you collect ‘bitchin rocks.’” He pulls something out of an armor compartment, and Jacobi holds out a hand. Felix drops a chunk of mahogany obsidian into her palm. It's mottled orange and black and sharp and it kind of reminds her of Felix himself. 

She likes it. “Thanks,” she says, a genuine smile on her face. Felix leans on her desk with a suggestive grin, and she holds up a hand. “I'm gay, sweetheart, try that bad boy act on one of my nurses.”

“Damn,” he says. “I was hoping I had a chance, but I guess Kimball has me beat.”

Jacobi blushes. “Am I that obvious?”

“Nah, I'm just a people person.” He pushes off her desk. “Keep the rock.”

She watches him leave, then looks back at the obsidian. Slowly, she stands, walking to the only file on her shelves not in a stack, and puts the rock on top of it.

Now Felix's records are properly filed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> From the [doc](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1euGnfyh6O01P5u5dVyJbNr9yMSwVHwtQ0ay7WU9AJ7A/edit?usp=sharing):  
>  **Alanna Jacobi (Nile's OC):** Medical Empathy/Otter's Touch/No AI/Knows/Given
> 
> The rest of her relevant information is either in the doc or incoming bc _fuck_ I started this last night and I'm already five hundred words into the next chapter what the fuck
> 
> You'd think, with the way this chapter ended, the endgame pairing would be Jacobi and Kimball but nope, she's just really gay. All of us have a crush on Kimball. Admit it to yourself.


	2. Hair Tie Promises

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love my girl so much guys

Jacobi looks at the four soldiers in her exam room. They’re stripped to their kevlar undersuits with their brightly colored accents, looking lost. The part of her that drove her to be a doctor wants to _help_ , but this is a hurt she doesn’t know how to heal.

Fucking _Feds_.

In the two years she’s had her Gift, she’s acclimated well. She can sense their injuries from here: the orange one twisted his ankle, the blue one has bruises up and down his chest, the teal one has a moderate concussion she’ll have to monitor. The red(maroon?) one has a strange ache in his shoulder and hip that she can’t quite place. 

She straightens the papers on her clipboard and steps into the room. “Good afternoon, I’m Doctor Alanna Jacobi. Welcome to the New Republic.”

“Hello,” the blue one says, trying to sound cheery, she thinks, but it doesn’t quite make it past the misery. “I’m Caboose.”

The others echo his greeting, and she scrawls their names on her clipboard. She’ll turn the notes she takes into more cohesive files later, then upload everything to the server.

(She still doesn’t trust that server. It’s gone down five times since she finished writing everything.)

She sets the clipboard down and hooks the stethoscope in her ears, taking vitals and asking her usual questions. All of then insist they’re fine, except Caboose, who lets her poke at his ribs. The bruising is mostly superficial, and his ribs aren’t broken. 

“Let me see your ankle,” she orders Grif, and he leans back a little.

“How did you-” he starts, and shakes his head. “Fucking doctors.” He limps to her examination table and she checks swelling and presses on the bone to check for fractures. Grif hisses and swears, but his ankle isn’t broken. He’ll be okay.

She informs Tucker he’ll be staying for observation, and he protests, but Jacobi will not be moved. Simmons is hesitant to show her his shoulder, but eventually he gives in and undoes his suit.

She’s never seen prosthetics like that. The nerve connections simultaneously are the most sophisticated she’s ever seen and look like they were built from scrap metal in her dad’s garage with her papa’s radio parts. She stares helplessly for a second.

“They just ache sometimes,” Simmons tells her. “It’s not a problem.”

 _Poor nerve connections,_ she thinks, _or phantom pains?_ Her residency was in cardiothoracic surgery, she’s so out of her depth here she wants to scream. (She’s been out of her depth for the past six or seven years, since the war started in earnest, but she has to be enough.)

“Let me know if it gets worse,” Jacobi says, finally. She has no idea what she’ll do if this turns into a problem, but she’ll figure something out. It’s worked this far.

She makes a note to talk to the rest of the surgeons and see if any of them might know how to help. Kimball gave her complete control of their cases, and she isn’t ashamed to pass off what she doesn’t know how to handle.

She sets Tucker up in an observation room and sends the other three with a cadet to they’re new quarters. She’s certain they’ll all be back in her ward before her shift is over.

She steps into her office and drops heavily into her chair, pulling four new folders from her desk and labelling them with her four newest patients. Her pen hovers over a clean sheet of paper.

She doesn’t write. Instead, she puts the pen down and drops her head into her hands. She’s been working since dawn that morning, when Felix dragged the four colorful soldiers and the handful of survivors of Locus’s attack on the crash site back to HQ, and one of them still died on her table with her hands in their chest.

The day isn’t even over. 

“Doctor Jacobi?”

“Felix.” She looks up and tries to smile. He’s obviously not convinced.

“Corporal McCarthy wasn’t your fault,” he says.

“I know. Sometimes you can’t save them, I _know_.” She draws in a shuddering breath. “We’re losing, Felix. We can’t take many more losses like that before we don’t have the manpower to keep going.”

“We’re gonna turn things around.” He sounds so sure, she almost believes him.

“We?”

The mercenary shrugs. “Guess I’m attached. It’s the damn doctors, being so likeable.”

That pulls a laugh from her. “Thank you.”

“What’re friends for?” He moves to stand by her desk. “I’ll take McCarthy’s file to Kimball, if you want. I know you hate it.”

“I’ll do it,” she tells him. “There’s no family to tell, this time. It’s just going into the archives.”

She hates being the one to inform family about death, not because of the grief, but because of the immediate acceptance. Every time a soldier leaves the caves, it’s accepted that they will not come back. It’s better to celebrate than to mourn.

So Jacobi mourns for them.

Felix touches her shoulder, the edges of his armor cold even through her lab coat. “They don’t deserve you.”

“They deserve so much more, but I’ll have to be enough.” She’s been saying that for years. “Felix, what are your rates these days? I need something.”

He pops his helmet off. He said something, once, about how serious transactions should be done face-to-face. “Depends on what you need.”

“A supply run to Ossia, just outside Armonia. I did my residency in the hospital there, and they had a research division for orthotics. I need that research.”

“Armonia’s crawling with Feds, Alanna,” Felix says. “What makes you think it’s still there?”

“Because the Feds have Emily Grey.” She sighs. “And Doctor Emily Grey pioneered most of that research. She would have had her own copies in Armonia. And maybe it isn’t there! Maybe all of Ossia burned to the ground years ago, but-” She shakes her head and smiles up at him helplessly. “I have to try. So, what would I owe you?”

He tilts his head, considering. “My next recon mission puts me pretty close to there. I’ll see how difficult getting in would be and get back to you. Down payment can be what you need it for.”

“I don’t know anything about prosthetics,” she says simply. “That’s Doctor Anwar, and he’s… I can’t ask him to take on another patient, his caseload is already double what it should be.”

“And one of the Reds and Blues has a prosthetic?”

“You know I’m not allowed to answer that.”

“So, yes.”

“ _Felix_.”

He grins playfully and tugs on her braid. She swats his hand. “Ow, shit, armor.”

“You could wear yours, you know.”

“Felix, darling,” she smiles, his cheer contagious, “if something happens to me in here, I’m pretty sure no armor in the universe will save me. Besides, you're here to protect me.”

“Of course. How have those hair ties from my last run lasted you?” His hand darts out and pulls the tie from her hair, holding it teasingly above his head. 

Jacobi snatches it back. “I've already lent most of them out. Kimball keeps breaking hers, and I'm pretty sure Private Valdez is ADHD, so she sets them down and leaves them. So if you happen to find some on your next supply run, it’d be appreciated.”

“Why don’t you just cut it?” Felix sits on her desk. It groans under the weight of his armor, but it’s sturdy, and it holds. “Seems like a hassle.”

Jacobi twists the tie back on the end of her braid. Loose, her hair brushes against her hips, and she has to spend forever pinning it up if she wants to wear a helmet. It’s part of the reason she rarely bothers. “I came to Chorus for my residency. Ossia and Armonia were training new doctors in hopes of getting more medical professionals in the colony and I saw an opportunity. The last thing my fathers said to me was to… find myself. Try something new, figure out who I was without them. ‘Just don’t cut your hair,’ Papa said. It was a joke, and I immediately chopped all of it off. Then the war started, and we lost contact with the rest of the galaxy, and…” she shrugs. “I stopped cutting it. It’s a promise to myself. I’m gonna survive this and go home.”

Felix blinks, slow, and Jacobi is briefly reminded of a cat. “A good promise, Alanna.”

“I think so, too.” She stands and pulls a file from her shelves, from a stack under a jagged piece of shale. “I need to archive this. Thank you, Felix.”

Her friend tilts his head. “Anytime.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯


	3. Pointless Causes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Honestly I should be working on the borderlands au but i don't want to make Caboose cry, so I'm putting it off the way I'm procrastinating one of the story missions in the actual game.
> 
> So we're making Alanna cry instead, bc she's my OC and I'll do what I want, up to and including projecting my own goddamn trauma on her.

Two days after she releases Tucker from her infirmary, Jacobi makes her way to the mess hall to eat something that isn’t one of the ration bars she has tucked away in her desk. Matthews and his friends, Palomo and Jensen, flock to her side almost immediately, and she lets their voices slide into white noise as she eats. She pulled another twenty hour shift and she just wants to faceplant into her bed, thank you very much, but if she doesn’t eat now she won’t get the chance.

It takes her several moments to realize the cadets have gone quiet. She lifts her eyes from her tray and leans back, because Tucker is _there_ , almost nose to nose with her.

“Private Tucker?” she asks. 

“Captain, now, according to Kimball. You look tired, Doctor Jacobi.”

“Incredibly so.”

“Maybe I can help you relax?”

The whole mess hall goes silent. Jacobi’s overtired brain needs several moments to process what Tucker is after, but when it does, she starts laughing.

“What, hey!” Tucker protests, offended. 

“No, no, I’m sorry.” Alanna wipes tears from her eyes. “You’re new, it isn’t your fault.”

“What isn’t?”

“Alanna’s a lesbian,” Felix says as he passes. He sets a paper cup in front of Alanna as he goes- mint tea, not coffee and now there’s tears for a different reason.

Tucker visibly tenses. “I’m so sorry,” he says, but she waves off the apology.

“I’m not uncomfortable, Captain,” she tells him. “You are not the first man to proposition me and you likely won’t be the last. At least you accepted rejection.”

Tucker waves at her as she stumbles back to her room fifteen minutes later and she suspects that will be the end of that.

It is and it isn’t. Three days after that, he slinks into her office clutching his elbow, which is already starting to swell from a sprain. She rolls her eyes and hands him and ice pack. Tucker looks around her office, at the piles of folders and the rocks on top of them, but doesn’t ask. He leaves as quietly as he came.

Alanna hates that she recognises the look in his eyes and adds a note to his file- _possible depression: watch for self-harm?_

The worst part is she sees it: he keeps coming back, slipping silently into her office at all hours of the night with a half-dozen little injuries from neglect, from pushing too hard and too long until it hurts, and she can’t figure out what he’s hurting himself _for_. 

The cadets know they can talk to her, know about the neat rows of scars on her hips and thighs and wrists from when she was their age, but she feels that approaching Captain Tucker about this directly will make him shut down. So she treats him the best she can, and quietly gives him the code for her private quarters in case he needs something when she’s not on shift. 

One night, she returns to her office and he’s there with Felix. She picks up the ache in his knuckles from whatever he’d done this time, but there’s small starbursts of pain from bruises on his hips in fingertip patterns, and Felix keeps shooting hungry looks at him from the corner of his eye.

She takes Tucker’s hands to poke gently at the swelling there. They’re scraped raw, but fine. “You know the drawer, Felix.”

“Just want permission, first,” he says, already opening the desk drawer. 

“What’s in there?” Tucker asks. His spine straightens when Felix holds up a condom. “Oh. Are we obvious?”

“I’m just very good at my job.” And she’s been CMO for an army of horny teenagers for two years, one of its head doctors for nearly five. She knows when people are barely keeping their pants on. “I’m also a professional, Captain. Nothing that happens in my office leaves it.” With that, she gives him another cold compress. “Ice those for at least ten minutes before you get your dicks out, please.”

Tucker snorts. “Yes, Doctor Jacobi.”

“Alanna,” she corrects. “If you’re not on one of my hospital beds, you can call me Alanna. All my friends do.”

He stares at her for a moment before Felix says, “Tucker,” in a tone that has Alanna’s skin crawling. That isn’t Felix’s fault, though, so she sees them out without a word. 

She drops her head into her hands and shivers through the sensory echoes. A touch to her wrist and the scars there remind her that it’s over and years gone. 

Somehow, Matthews’s rock is back in her hand, her thumb running along the edge of it. God, she really was an otter, wasn’t she? Had a favorite rock and everything. She makes her way back to her desk, passing the rock from hand to hand as she goes. It makes her feel settled, the buzzing overstimulation she feels after a shift starting to settle. 

She pulls up her inventory lists on her tablet and begins the long process of updating them until she falls asleep at her desk.

She wakes sharply when someone touches her shoulder. Matthews grins sheepishly. “Sorry, ‘Lana. You weren’t at breakfast this morning.”

“Sorry,” she mumbles, taking the coffee and draining half the mug and making a face. “Are we out of sugar again?”

“Yeah.” Matthews shifts from foot to foot. “Alanna?”

“What is it, Nicola?”

“I put in to be a member of the new captains’ squads.”

Jacobi feels her heart skip. “Why?”

“I’m old enough now, and I feel like we have a chance with them.”

He’s _not._ He’s the furthest from old enough possible, at fourteen, just like Jensen at fifteen and Bitters at nineteen and Kimball at thirty and Alanna herself at twenty-eight. All of them are too young to be picking up guns and fighting and dying for a cause that doesn’t _fucking matter_ anymore. But Nicola is still talking, about how he’s read the news article from Project Freelancer and how the Reds and Blues are heroes and tries not to scream, remembering an eight-year-old hunched and scared and orphaned on her exam table.

Her son can’t be a soldier, she thinks wildly. “Just be careful,” is what she says out loud.

Nicola grins at her, and Alanna is more terrified than she’s ever been in her life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I changed my tumblr url! find me at boxonthenile.tumblr.com


	4. Tip 240

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guess what series is officially a crossover? Listen to scifi podcast Wolf 359 [here](https://www.wolf359.fm).

Jacobi shuffles files around to make four new piles.

Green Squad: Captain Tucker, Lieutenant Cunningham, Private Palomo, Private Rogers.

Blue Squad: Captain Caboose, Lieutenant Andersmith, Private Lionetti, Private Wolkowitz, Private Ehler.

Maroon Squad: Captain Simmons, Lieutenant Jensen, Private Takumi, Private Valdez, Private Briggs.

Gold Squad: Captain Grif, Lieutenant Bitters, Private Ito, Private Shaban, and…

And Private Nicola Matthews. Moving that file from the non-combatants piles is the worst thing she’s ever done. It took everything she had not to go to General Kimball and ask her to overturn the request.

She picks the rocks for them carefully. Maroon Squad gets the fragment of concrete Jensen brought her from the foundations of a small community college in a bombed-out town. Blue Squad’s rock is heart shaped. Green Squad has a rough piece of what Cunningham said was chrysoprase he lifted from an abandoned gem store in Forzando. 

Jacobi sets Captain Grif's file on the top of the stack for Gold Squad and pulls a rock from her pocket; one with folded layers that looked like a J. It feels wrong to be parted from it, but filing Matthews any other way feels worse.

She sets the rock on Captain Grif's folder and stares for a long time.

“Doctor?”

“Felix!” Jacobi whips around, forcing a smile. “What brings you here?”

“My next supply run is taking me close enough to Ossia that I can do some recon.” He leans comfortably against the doorframe.

“What will I owe you for that?” she asks. 

“What's your Gift?”

That… wasn't quite what she expected. She's marked the files of people she thinks have Gifts, and Felix is indeed one of them, but she didn't think any of them actually knew about them.

“I'm not sure,” Alanna says truthfully. “At least, I don't know the name of it. I just… know when someone hurts. I can tell what's wrong. How long have your abs been sore?”

“That must get annoying,” Felix scoffs. 

She shrugs. “Overwhelming, sometimes. We think I'm some sort of Otter.”

“We?” 

“Uh uh uh,” she scolds. “Patient confidentiality. What's yours?”

“Not part of the deal, doctor,” he teases. “I have to keep some secrets to uphold my image.”

“What image,” she shoots back, grinning. “Is that all?”

“Yeah.” He pushes off the doorframe. “By the way, Captain Grif was looking for Kimball earlier, and you're sort of her advisor, so he may come this way. He was on quite the warpath.”

“Oh, dear,” Jacobi sighed. “Thank you, for the heads up.” Felix saluted jauntily as he left. She watched the door for a moment, until the ache she could sense passed out of range. 

She groaned and dropped her head to her desk. She loved her Gift, it made her job so much easier, made her that much quicker at finding what was wrong, saved so many more lives than she could without it, but it was overstimulating. She didn't feel others’ pain so much as be _aware_ of it, but it didn't ever stop, and with the close quarters of the base, she was always sensing _something._

“Jacobi!” 

“Oh god no,” she muttered into the metal under her face. She could hear heavy footsteps in the hall and sighed, reaching up and pulling the tie from her braid. Maybe that would help her headache.

Captain Grif appeared in the doorway, Simmons and Tucker behind him. Simmons mouthed an apology as Grif slammed his tablet on Jacobi's desk. “Fourteen,” he seethed. 

“I assume you are referring to Privates Matthews and Palomo?”

“They're fucking _kids_ ,” Tucker hissed.

“They are. So are Lieutenant Jensen and Private Ehler. There's a handful of fifteen year olds in my infirmary as we speak.”

“You're letting children fight a war?” Grif was still yelling. “And you're okay with this?”

“No,” Alanna said softly. “No, I'm not. Nicola is my son, Captain, why in God's name would I be _okay_?” The captains were dumbstruck. “I don't want this anymore than you, but -”

“But you believe in this cause,” Grif said bitterly, and Alanna broke into pained, harsh laughter. 

“I stopped believing in this four years ago,” she told him. “But _they haven't_ , and someone needs to put them back together when they break.” She stood, gesturing at the shelves full of paper files and rocks. “All of this is for them, not for a cause that doesn't fucking matter anymore. This war was pointless two years in, and it's been almost seven. But I will _see it through_ , because the other choice is letting these _fucking kids_ die.”

She grit her teeth against the next words, the confession, the guilt she’s carried this long.

Grif’s shoulders sagged. “Matthews is just a kid. Your son?”

“His parents were some of the first casualties,” she said. “Vanessa saved him, actually, back when she was Major Kimball instead of General. I tried to talk her through defusal of a bomb some Fed strapped to a fucking eight year old. It failed. I still don’t know how they got out of there alive, but they did.” 

“You talked her through defusal?” Simmons asked, and she nodded.

“I was Ballistics for the first year and a half, but then they needed doctors more than explosives.” Alanna picked up the rock marking Gold Team’s files and turned it over and over in her hands. “Things that break other things,” she muttered, then spoke up. “My father was military. Ballistics. He never really readjusted to civilian life. We built bombs in the garage.” She snorted. “Family tradition.” 

The three captains flinched.

“They’re fucking kids,” Tucker said miserably. 

“They’re fucking kids,” Alanna echoed, “and that’s why we need you.” She put the rock back. “Three Eighty-Four: The concept of fate is a fiction. Be the author of your mission. Ensure there is a happy ending for everyone.”

“Dr. Jacobi?”

“I have work to do,” she said, and grabbed her lab coat, and swept past them down towards the infirmary.

She was a coward. Her aunts would be ashamed.

 

Tip Two Forty: You know what you did.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pryce and Carter's Deep Space Survival Procedure and Protocol Manual Tip 240: **YOU KNOW WHAT YOU DID.**
> 
> Pryce and Carter's Deep Space Survival Procedure and Protocol Manual Tip 384: The concept of "fate" is nothing but pure fiction. Be the author of your mission. Make damn sure there is a happy ending. For everyone.


End file.
